Please change the stupid circles, on GCD. I don't care if the circle is on an actual ability that requires a timer but the damn circles on every GCD every move is annoying.
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Please change the stupid circles, on GCD. I don't care if the circle is on an actual ability that requires a timer but the damn circles on every GCD every move is annoying.
An option would be nice
I'd reaaaaaally love if they didn't straight up change or remove it though, I honestly quite like it how it is now.
There was a whole long post by the devs about this, shortly after it came in. They said something like: 90% of their test audience loved it, while 10% hated it. So they went with the 90% and basically said sucks to be you to the 10%. It's here to stay.
If Disco Balls are here to stay then dangit I want a John Travolta Saturday Night Fever dance. That would regularly fire off your GCD for no reason.
It was weird to me at first, but within a day or two I didn't even notice it anymore. That being said, options are a good thing. I don't want to go back to how it was before 3.2, but there's no reason they can't have style options like many other games.
I know they gave their usual PS3 limitations reason, but I feel like they didn't understand what was being requested. I'll admit I have no idea how any of that stuff works, but they could just add the cooldown style options for PS4 and PC users only and likely cover almost all of the people who don't like the current style. They've done it with graphics options and other things already, so it seems more like just not wanting to put time into something most people likely don't care about.
Oh, I never even saw that post. I suppose that's why other games with cooldown style options reload the UI whenever you change something like that.
Here's the post : http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...00#post3588300
Drove me nuts at first but now I don't notice it... just had to adjust to something being on my screen that wasn't there before.
I'm with the 90% on this. I'm really enjoying the new timers and animation for them.
Glowy disco balls still drive me up the freaking wall. >.>
Yeah, 90%... of 50 people, not even all of whom even play the game. What kind of messed up test data was that? I can't even.
And look at the first post there, with 50+ likes from people in support of removing it. If that was all I polled, oh look, I've got a 100% disapproval rating.
I'm not saying it has to be removed for the few people that like it, but an option would be nice, regardless of whatever ridiculous excuse we get for why we can't have the option.
I don't really see what the issue is.
And, judging by the replies on this post and my own observations in-game, that still seems to be around 90%, so what's the problem?
Okay, you don't like it and that's fine. You're entitled to your opinion. But personally, the old ones were awful for figuring out when a skill was re-usable. Ever tried using an ability only to find out it wasn't quite charged because it had a couple of seconds left, but the icon looked almost identical to its default? I have. Many times.
The new ones give me a clear indication of when I can use my skills, so it gets full marks for me. It's not like you should be staring at your hotbar for the entire game anyway.
I love it, they should make it optional, but please SE DO NOT REMOVE THEM!
Also a fan of the new timers. It was a pain trying to use a CD that looked like it was ready but really wasn't. Threw me off every time.
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thats how it feels @.@
Also a fan. Mashing buttons which look as though they're ready only to find that there are still a couple of seconds of the cooldown left was tedious and annoying. That's not to say I'd protest if they did manage to get an option to keep both sets of people happy someday - choice is always good - but I'd rather keep this new system than revert to the old one if that's the only alternative on offer.
It's a fallacy to say that the likes in the thread about the topic are the full picture, because people are significantly more likely to get invested in a topic which actually interests them than the other way around and there's no accurate way to tell how many diffferent people read the topic but didn't care enough to log in and leave a Like etc. People who are happy with the new display don't care as much as those who find it distracting.
If you just stop focusing and raging about them, you won't notice them anymore. Right now it only bothers you because you focus on it and keep thinking how annoying it is....and you focus on it more.
I was fine with the old design but I appreciate the new one too and especially the counter.
Now the AOE indication....it was great when Heavensward came out (strong outer circle, almost nothing inside). They changed it back to almost filling the circle again, which sucks majorly for me and yet, do I whine about it every other week? Seeing overlapping AOE is a pain like this and yet I deal and so do others. So deal with this change as well.
People actually look at their bars? I have mine memorized, both location and cooldown. Then again as a healer, my cooldown is finished pretty close to when a spell is done casting.
If the little tiny GCD animations are bothering you, you are spending way to much time looking at your hotbars and not what is going on in game.
Out of curiosity what's wrong with the new ones for some people?
I don't mind them but I really don't think they needed to change them either, nothing wrong with the old ones.
Too much movement down in hotbars. It draws attention to my eyes/distracting.. I hated it when it first came out, and i still hate it. Only way ive found to cope is to change some to macro icons and use muscle memory...
The trouble they were trying to fix is making it easier to know when the skill is ready to fire again. The old method had the icon gradually "brighten" using a clock sweep. Trouble is, it looked full in the last second or so (95% of the icon was bright, hard to see the sliver that wasn't). So, they added another graphical element - a bright white ring in addition to the clock sweep brightening. Now, the ring must disappear before the skill is ready. This makes it easier to tell.
The trouble is, both methods, but in particular the new one, makes the hot bars visually busy - "noisy" in communications lingo. This makes it more difficult for many because you now must try to notice something in a sea of visual distraction. This is particularly bad because this treatment is applied to all actions, including GCD. One action results in a dozen icons becoming animated. GCD actions are done on player rhythm more so than visual cue. Non GCD actions are the ones that need the cue and it would be much easier to see if not distracted by all the GCD noise.
The change they applied was lazy (no change to the sweep method or differentiation between GCD and off GCD). There are many graphical treatments that would work better without adding visual noise.
They are bright, white circles.
Brightness tends to draw attention, which is why typically, skills that are on CD are darkened (still are!), so they innately draw less attention (Indicating: Can't use this, move along eyes!). That's a rather general video game convention, because it's simply been proven people pay more attention to the flashing lights than the shadow below. In addition, we tend to pay more attention to moving things than still things and those circles are definitely on the moving side of things.
It's simply counterintuitive and distracting, like a flashing advertisement moving up and down somewhere on the screen. You shouldn't pay attention to it, you know you shouldn't, it's not relevant right now, but...the eye innately gets drawn there.
I like the new cooldowns, reminds me of 1.0. That being said, I've always had a problem with some of SE's "because limitations" excuses.
According to the above link, the issue is the PS3's small memory (or in this case video memory) size. However why would you have both animations loaded into memory at all? If a user switched between animation styles, the application should unload the old animation, and load in the new one. The only real penalty is physical storage (of which the data would take less than 1mb), and the few milliseconds to unload/load the new image when the user switches the style in options (which the game engine is doing all the time ANYWAY).
This reminds me of the time SE said they wouldn't add more macros due to bandwidth limitations.... even though macros are stored client side.
Well, actually... I don't know if it's due to latency or their coding being similar to macro coding (no fractions of seconds for you! >:C), but I can activate CDs about a second or two before the ring vanishes. It's mostly noticeable through Brutal Swing, due to needing to time stuns on certain mobs' attacks. I've tried to check it via the tiny tiny countdown numbers (on dummies or otherwise "lazy" fights where I can take attention from the fight to actually look at the hotbars), and it seems that the counter reaches 0, and then the game goes, "Oh, this skill is ready now, I guess I'd better remove the overlay." Meaning there's a small delay between skill being ready and the cooldown overlay disappearing.
Admittedly, it's better to be able to activate a skill before it's "ready" than it is to think it's ready when it's not, and it's a lot better since they lowered the brightness a bit, but it's still annoying on those GCD cooldowns, since you pretty much know the rhythm of it by heart anyway. IMO, it'd be best if GCD overlays were in the old style, and only the longer cooldowns used the new style. Unfortunately, I rather guess their response to that request would be "PS3 limitations" =/
I've seen this as well. I'm sure it's due to the round trip delay. The more lag you suffer, the earlier you can jump the skill.
A better design would allow you to take advantage of this delay in a repeatable way. For example, have the sweep only happen in the last 4 seconds of the refresh time while keeping the number to check progress. Your lag might allow you to fire when this changed sweep is 3/4 finished for example (much easier to see than when there is just a sliver left). Adding the sweep only in the last 4 seconds also helps direct your attention to the skill at a more relevant time.
Most importantly, remove or change this completely for GCD skills. Way too much visual clutter.